However long the night, the dawn will break

Hope and Resilience

“However long the night, the dawn will break.”

Being on a fertility journey can be mentally, physically and emotionally challenging and can take years. How do you cope with the unknown on the first cycle of fertility treatment, or cope with the stress of having many attempts of treatment? How do you pick yourself up after each cycle of IVF? How do you manage with the stress and disappointment to be able to move forward with new hope and courage on the next stage of your fertility journey? The stress and anxiety of trying to conceive can put pressure on your relationships, your job, and finances, and ultimately taking a toll on your health and wellbeing.

Feeling devastated and a failure, as each month passes without falling pregnant can put pressure on you and your family. How do you cope when you feel everyone around is happily having babies. Do you feel resentment and start to isolate your shelf from family and friends. Infertility can cause emotional issues, how can you learn to manage your feelings and thoughts on your fertility journey?

Breathe away stress and tension

“Breathe in ..slowly..calmy..mindfully..breathe out”

By learning stress reduction techniques you can not only learn tools to help you mange stress in everyday life, but also to empower you in situations when your fertility is in the hands of the fertility clinics and doctors managing your fertility treatment.

By nurturing the mind and body through relaxations and complementary therapies you can focus more positively, stay calm and accept where you are at each stage of treatment. This will aid your recovery of distress and disappointment to enable you to move forward to the next stage, with hope to thrive mentally and physically. By feeling better your can have a more positive outlook and look at different perspectives on a situation, as you many have to live and cope with your fertility journey for months or even years. This is when complementary therapies to manage stress and improve mental clarity and can benefit the patient alongside western medicine, to heal and focus on the wellbeing of the patient on their journey to having a healthy pregnancy and baby.

Participants on the Mind Body Program at the Mind Body Institute in the US, state that they can make better decision and manage stress, by developing coping strategies by learning relaxation techniques to gain better control over their health. Alice Domar the director of Mind/Body Centre for Women’s Health at Harvard Medical School demonstrated the evidence of stress relief is a study of 110 women trying to get pregnant for up to two years. They were split into three groups, the first receiving only fertility support, the second group focused on relaxation therapies to include yoga and meditation and the third group was just given fertility treatment. “After a year, only 20% of the women on medication alone became pregnant compared to about half the women in both types of support groups”[i] For men to benefit to, studies show that men who have a regular yoga practice can enhance their reproductive health, by improving the success rate of conception by increasing sperm count and motility.

Hi, my name is Lisa Attfield and I am a mum of three young children. I've used Yoga for more than 15 years to achieve relaxation, inner peace and help myself on the road to fertility and motherhood. For more information please do get in touch.